


How to Break a Heart In

by speakgreektome (epicionly)



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Having a Heart Sucks, Post-Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance, Spoilers - Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 23:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2044041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epicionly/pseuds/speakgreektome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxas becomes a somebody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Break a Heart In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yourhandiheld](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourhandiheld/gifts).



> Found this in my DB folder while clearing out space. You likely remember this one.

Roxas doesn’t get along with Riku, shoulders stiff, face pale and drawn. He tolerates Goofy and Donald with unsure lifts of the corner of his mouths, eyes flickering between the look in their eyes and Sora’s, awkward silences in between their attempted teasing. He replicates how he was when he had a heart again and became somebody; he looks lost in the way a child does in a room full of towers and spires and a population marching through the cobblestone city and he doesn’t know where to go to from here.

Sometimes, he skitters close to Kairi. You’d think it’d just be to see her smile at him because whenever she does, he calms down and smiles shakily right back. But then he returns to Sora’s side, hands clenched on Sora’s shoulders, gripping so tightly he almost seems like he’s going to black out again, mumbling: “I can’t do this.”

Sora doesn’t think he knows how to make it easier for him. Roxas’s face is a storm of everything, and he always looks so sick when he isn’t sleeping. Is it sleeping? It’s not like the way Riku and Kairi do it, all three of them with unanimous equity and balance: Roxas goes to bed with his head on the pillow and his back to the mattress, but when he dozes off, he curls into Sora’s side, hand snaking into Sora’s own. In the middle of the night, he turns with his back away to the wall, and Sora wakes up from sleep where Roxas has moved himself back enough that there’s space for someone in between the wall and him. Time and again, it's the same--his hand will still always hold tightly onto Sora’s own.

(“You’re going to be fine,” Sora says, and Roxas says, “Yeah, right, okay,” a double negative and an affirmative, so maybe he believes and maybe he doesn’t, but he wants to.)

Roxas isn’t nice to people; or at least, he gives off the impression that he could be nice, but he either doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how to. He’s quiet where Sora is loud, content to sit by him as Sora contributes all the conversation for them both. He’s short-worded and comes off impatient and he sometimes leaves Riku bristling and angry enough that there’s shouting matches, and Roxas has to be let out of the room and Riku has to be told to mind himself. But that’s not it; maybe it’s because of how people react to him, and because Roxas doesn’t know how to react with people that have hearts.

(“You’re my somebody,” Roxas tries out. Sora shoves a pillow over his grinning face, taking enjoyment from how Roxas grasps a pillow and tries to beat his head with it, waving it wildly around.

“You’re _your_ somebody,” Sora says, and pulls the pillow away to Roxas’s warm smile.)

It surprises him that Roxas doesn’t spend more time with Lea or the other way around.  Sure, their interactions are rare and few, caught in between the fact that Roxas doesn’t need to train to use his Keyblade but Master Yen Sid says he must practice control, and the fact that Lea has all the control in the world, but doesn’t seem to respect the significance of what wielding a Keyblade entails. But—but it’s so different than what Sora thought it’d be. Because when Lea comes around, loose-limbed and secure in himself, Roxas gets mad. When Roxas comes around with tears in his mouth and stress on his lips, Lea either backs off or is never to be seen.

(“A heart is such a heavy burden,” Roxas says one day, bitter and laughing, and he looks like he wants to pitch something, and he looks even sicker for it. “How do you bear do it? Do you just do?”

 Sora gets him to play on the beach those days, because Roxas can do it like the best of them; it works best when it’s just the two of them. Roxas is always happier after because he goes to sleep faster, exhausted, and doesn’t have to think about it.)

There are a certain two people who always end up fighting, according to Kairi (who’s always been able to patiently out-wait even the most stubborn of people). It’s not really with fists and keyblades, but it’s in the way Lea goes tight-lipped and draws himself straight and in the way Roxas hurls words after words and they don’t seem to know what to do with each other. So they don’t go training together, they don’t go to missions together, and everyone pretends it’s all right because they don’t have the luxury of talking about it, even though it’s Lea and Roxas’s hearts that suffer with every confrontation.

(“Do you think it was easier, without a heart?” Sora asks when they share the bed again. Sometimes when Sora wakes, Roxas isn’t there anymore, and it’s always after a fight with Lea that he’s so hard to talk to, because he always says he just wants to sleep.

“I don’t know, I don’t care,” Roxas says, his back to Sora. He sounds like he just threw up, but Sora’s been with him for the whole day, and Roxas was fine when they were just training. “I have one now. There’s no point.”

“Axel told me once that I made him feel like he had a heart,” Sora says, watching the line of shoulders that stiffen. He kicks him on the ankles. “Roxas.”

Roxas doesn’t respond, but he sits up, stares at Sora. Sora doesn’t look away.

“Roxas,” he says again to the tight expression.

Roxas crawls off the bed and jerks on his clothes and goes. Sora gives him half a minute, then gets up and follows him.

They stay on the beach where they watch a star fall, and Roxas says, “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with this.”)

In the end, Sora can’t possibly understand how much Lea wants because Sora sees Roxas’s private smiles and hears his laughter so abundantly, but Roxas might.

Lea talks to Sora sometimes, and sometimes he talks to Roxas through Sora, if he has to. “I’ll catch you around,” he says, and he looks at Roxas as though there will be one word and it’ll be better. But it’s never better, because Roxas seems to think that because he’s got a heart now, things have to change in how he acts, and Lea always leaves and never stays, and Sora is angry and so is Roxas.

But it does change. It does start.

Eventually, Roxas realizes he doesn't have to use his heart like Sora does.

(“I had a friend,” Roxas says, at last.

Sora listens.

Eyes closed. Breathing in, and voice tight. “Her name was Xion, and she was my best friend.”)

 

end.


End file.
